A Telegram bot to help people with their flat search

Flathunter is a Python application which periodically scrapes property listings sites that the user has configured to find new apartment listings, and sends notifications of the new apartment to the user via Telegram.

• Background
• Install
• Usage
  • Command-line Interface
  • Web Interface
• Testing
• Credits
• Contributing
• License

There are at least four different rental property marketplace sites that are widely used in Germany - ImmoScout24, immowelt, WG-Gesucht and ebay Kleinanzeigen. Most people end up searching through listings on all four sites on an almost daily basis during their flat search.

With Flathunter, instead of visiting the same pages on the same four sites every day, you can set the system up to scan every site, filtering by your search criteria, and notify you when new flats become available that meet your criteria.

Flathunter is a Python (v3.6+) project - you will need Python3 installed to run the code. We recommend using pipenv to setup and configure your project. Install pipenv according to the instructions on the pipenv site, then run:

$ pipenv install

from the project directory to install the dependencies. Once the dependencies are installed, and every time you come back to the project in a new shell, run:

$ pipenv shell

to launch a Python environment with the dependencies that your project requires.

Note that a requirements.txt file is included in this repository for compatibilty with Google Cloud. It should not be treated as canonical.

For development purposes, you need to install the flathunter module in your current environment. Simply run:

pip install -e .

Before running the project for the first time, copy config.yaml.dist to config.yaml. The urls and telegram sections of the config file must be configured according to your requirements before the project will run.

To configure the searches, simply visit the property portal of your choice (e.g. ImmoScout), configure the search on the website to match your search criteria, then copy the URL of the results page into the config file. You can add as many URLs as you like, also multiple from the same website if you have multiple different criteria (e.g. running the same search in multiple different Bezirke).

• Currently, ebay-kleinanzeigen, immowelt and WG Gesucht only crawl the first page, so make sure to sort by newest offers.
• Your links should point to the German version of the websites, since it is tested only there. Otherwise you might have problems.

To be able to send messages to you over Telegram, you need to register a new bot with the BotFather for flathunter to use. Through this process, a "Bot Token" will be created for you, which should be configured under bot_token in the config file.

To know who should Telegram messages should be sent to, the "Chat IDs" of the recipients must be added to the config file under receiver_ids. To work out your own Chat ID, send a message to your new bot, then run:

$ curl https://api.telegram.org/bot[BOT-TOKEN]/getUpdates

to get list of messages the Bot has received. You will see your Chat ID in there.

To use the distance calculation feature a Google API-Key is needed and requires the Distance Matrix API to be enabled. (This is NOT free)

Since this feature is not free, it is "disabled". Read line 62 in hunter.py to re-enable it.

You can run flathunter on Google's App Engine, in the free tier, at no cost. To get started, first install the Google Cloud SDK on your machine, and run:

$ gcloud init

to setup the SDK. You will need to create a new cloud project (or connect to an existing project). The Flathunters organisation uses the flathunters project ID to deploy the application. If you need access to deploy to that project, contact the maintainers.

$ gcloud config set project flathunters

You will need to add the project ID to config.yaml under the key google_cloud_project_id.

Google Cloud doesn't currently support Pipfiles. To work around this restriction, the Pipfile and Pipfile.lock have been added to .gcloudignore, and a requirements.txt file has been generated using pip freeze.

If the Pipfile has been updated, you will need to remove the line pkg-resources==0.0.0 from requirements.txt for a successful deploy.

To deploy the app, run:

$ gcloud app deploy

Your project will need to have the Cloud Build API enabled, which requires it to be linked to a billing-enabled account. It also needs Cloud Firestore API to be enabled for the project. Firestore needs to be configured in Native mode.

Instead of running with a timer, the web interface depends on periodic calls to the /hunt URL to trigger searches (this avoids the need to have a long-running process in the on-demand compute environment). You can configure Google Cloud to automatically hit the URL by deploying the cron job:

$ gcloud app deploy cron.yaml

By default, the application runs on the commandline and outputs logs to stdout. It will poll in a loop and send updates after each run. The processed_ids.db file contains details of which listings have already been sent to the Telegram bot - if you delete that, it will be recreated, and you may receive duplicate listings.

usage: flathunt.py [-h] [--config CONFIG]

Searches for flats on Immobilienscout24.de and wg-gesucht.de and sends results
to Telegram User

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --config CONFIG, -c CONFIG
                        Config file to use. If not set, try to use
                        '~git-clone-dir/config.yaml'

You can alternatively launch the web interface by running the main.py application:

$ python main.py

This uses the same config file as the Command-line Interface, and launches a web page at http://localhost:8080.

Alternatively, run the server directly with Flask:

$ FLASK_APP=flathunter.web flask run

The test suite can be run with pytest:

$ pytest

from the project root. If you encounter the error ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'flathunter', run:

pip install -e .

to make the current project visible to your pip environment.

This project is maintained by the members of the Flat Hunters Github organisation, which is a collection of individual unpaid volunteers who have all had their own processes with flat-hunting in Germany. If you want to join, just ping one of us a message!

The original code was contributed by @NodyHub, whose original idea this project was.

Other contributions were made along the way by

• Bene
• @tschuehly
• @Cugu
• @GerRudi
• @xMordax
• @codders

If you want to make a contribution, please check out the contributor code of conduct (en/de) first. Pull requests are very welcome, as are issues. If you file an issue, please include as much information as possible about how to reproduce the issue.